


at the briar labyrinth's heart

by Anonymous



Series: a moment, prompted [7]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: (he's dead though), Ghost is angry and tired, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28084167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: What power the king must have held, to create such a kingdom as this.What a coward he must have been, to abandon it and wither away here instead.
Series: a moment, prompted [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2186166
Kudos: 40
Collections: Anonymous, Unofficial FFA Anon Collection





	at the briar labyrinth's heart

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to FFA for the prompt "100 words of taking it out on your dad".

When Ghost reached the throne room, it was with an even blend of rage and dread, so potent and so familiar they felt tempted to coin a new name for it, just to encompass the sheer hell of the past hour or so of... whatever that had been.

There were buzzsaws. Hallownest bore many marks of mechanical advances - the trams, the warbling phonograph in the gardens, the toll gates for the stagways, those awful greedy pay-benches in the nobles' quarter of the city - but somehow, Ghost hadn't expected the palace to break its serene, timeless aesthetic with the shrieking wail of _hundreds of moving, spinning sawblades_ in every major room and passage.

Those couldn't have been there during the kingdom's prime. Ghost refused to believe anyone would live in such a place, even if they weren't as confident as they would have liked in the assumption that the old royals cared at all about any of the poor servants and retainers who would have had to brave the lengths of the castle day after day in such conditions.

It wasn't a charitable mood to arrive in, and that went a long way to explaining why, when faced with a long, empty throne room, Ghost's first instinct had been to hop up onto the platform, march right up to the throne, and deck the Pale King, once-ruler of an ancient and mysterious kingdom, right in his smug, worthless face.

The body clattered to the floor, the rotted-out shell ringing hollow against the tile. Now broken, the king's face stared up at the vaulted ceiling with eyes emptier than Ghost's, nothing more than a husk.

It didn't dissolve, though, and it didn't release anything like soul or even motes of the dream itself, and with a slow, lurching thought, they realized.

It was real.

This wasn't some memory. This was the Pale King, the Wyrm, the god of this ruined place and people. This was... the word left a feeling like venom in their mind, clinging and burning, repulsing, and yet they could find no other conclusion. The Root had spoken of him. They knew what he was.

Their father.

Had he been hiding here? Cloistered in his own dream like a coward, while his kingdom died around him? It seemed that every time they learned more of him, they found something new to hate.

All this suffering had been by his hand. The Old Light, angry and wanting, may have dealt the damage, but it was his hubris which drove this kingdom to ruin, and apart from it, his heartlessness which had driven him to such ends as the abyss and all the children dead within it. And now, it seemed, he had not even possessed the decency to suffer with his own, but instead sought escape into a place where none could follow, so heavily guarded and warded that it seemed only time and isolation had done him in. His body had sat untouched upon his throne in its decay, still propped up as if alive and awaiting an audience of the citizenry who prayed and pled for his return, even as the plague claimed them in mind and body and filled the streets with the dead.

For a bug that had tried so very hard to keep his kingdom safe, he seemed far better at sacrificing than protecting.

Ghost's nail found itself in their hands before they remembered it, and they did not think when they swung. All semblance of poise had long shattered in this place, and there was only the metal grip beneath their claws, the pale crown and dark eyes before them, and the pathetic shell of a man they would call a thousand names, each worse than the last, before they might ever grace it with the name of _father._

They wished they could have said it was enough. But they awoke again in the wreckage of what once had been a palace, between a pit of still corpses and a kingdom of walking ones, with a sibling still crying out above in silence, and they knew, deep in the void-chilled heart that did not beat in their chest, that it never would be.


End file.
